Word: munch
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Less Brilliance. Realistic detail was the first thing to go: in painting a sick child, Munch began with a version showing the bed and the sickroom. His final version accented only the patient's waxen profile and the bowed head of her mother. Next Munch ditched the literary symbolism of the '90s which had encrusted his early works. The early Munch implied death's universality by showing a skeleton embracing a nude. Later he was satisfied to suggest the same theme by painting three girls on a bridge at evening, staring down into the dark, still water...
...Munch overcame the brilliant painter's instinct to paint brilliantly. No one looking at his Self-Portrait with a Wine Bottle would be likely to exclaim first of all about Munch's technical skill. The fine painting is rigorously subordinated to the subject: a man, angry, lonely and lost, who stares from the deep perspective of the canvas...
...Munch described his self-portrait as a self-examination. Its colors-red and green in the figure, violet and orange in the background-increase the emotional punch. Painted in 1906, when he was already famous, it reflects the melancholia that continually plagued him. Munch's girl had recently threatened suicide because he refused to marry her, and when he tried to disarm her, she had shot him in the finger. He was drinking more & more, and throwing his weight around when he did. He had exiled himself from Norway after almost killing a man in a drunken brawl...
Same Strength. Two years later Munch entered a Copenhagen sanitarium for treatment of his alcoholism. Cured, he returned to Norway, spent the rest of his long life painting in semi-seclusion. His pictures grew steadily bigger and more objective, lost none of their power...
...could never have painted The Cry (a canvas bulging with Kafka-like horror which he did at 30), but neither could the young drunk have painted the Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed that Munch did four years before his death. That picture of a human being cornered by old age would stand as one of his finest, freshest works...